Ep. 856: Foundations - The Joys of Winter Wonderland Whitetails

in the cold often really really sucks. But that doesn't mean it's time to dust the cobwebs off of the dog and just forget about deer hunting completely. It just means that you have to learn learn to live with the coal, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. I've noticed something about most of the people who claim to love winter and snow and cold and all the dumb things that happen this time of year. Most of them don't ever have to spend much time outside.

My mother in law is one of those people, and she will often talk about how wonderful it is to get snow and how pretty the world looks to her in the winter. But she can also pretty much spend all winter laying on the couch watching Netflix too. Talk to oh, I don't know, like a dairy farmer or maybe someone who works in construction, and you might get a different reaction out of them since they have to go out and work in this shit no matter what.

There's a parallel to this in the deer hunting space, if you can believe that the folks I know who profess an undying love for the late season are also the people who have a very specific kind of hunting situation. I'll give you a hint here. Almost none of them own a saddle, and they'd look like a monkey trying to learn quantum physics if they had to try to

do some kind of mobile setup. They are most likely like a friend of a friend of mine, guy who talks a lot of shit about being an amazing hunter but also has a chunk of private ground in Iowa where he leaves several acres of standing beans every season

around his redneck blind. He'll casually say things like he had seventy deer in the field with him during late season hunts, and you'll say other things like get this, baiting isn't really hunting, which is an interesting take anyway, given the circumstances he sets up for himself to hunt deer when they need calories the most. I'm not going to go too deep into that right now, but maybe

in a different podcast. The truth is, generally speaking, if you love the late season, you probably have a super awesome place to hunt. But you might also just like the challenge and the fact that most folks have just pretty much given up on the season. There is that reality too, and it's a positive to the late season thing. In fact, this goes for private land as well as

public land in a lot of places. There are some real advantages to late season hunting, or at least there can be for all of us, and having the woods largely to ourselves is a real advantage. It allows you to mostly work the deer, which is huge when you're used to not only working the deer but working all of the other hunters who are also working all of the deer and presumably all of the other hunters including you.

There are some other advantages too. You can kind of forget about a lot of the deer sign that really blows the wind up your skirt in the early season. Now, I know there are some guys out there who are still hunting scrapes and they are killing deer on them, probably, But you're not going to probably, and I probably won't either, because that's not really on my radar at all. Neither

are rubs, and I love rubs. I pay attention to them, and they might indicate a thicker area that a late season buck could hole up in, But that isn't really like a hunting sign. It's like using sign to sort of back test your theory about where deer might be. But of course you could just look at the cover and make a pretty well educated guess on whether deer will be there or not. The sign that matters now is tracks where deer walk matters, and it matters a

lot this time of year. This only gets easier when you get snow, But even up here in Canada South it feels like snow is harder to come by than it used to be. If you live farther south, you might not ever get that advantage, but you usually do get some level of freezing and thawing, and that can be beneficial for looking for tracks and beating down trails. This is important because late season hunting usually kind of

involves starting fresh. The deer after gun season becomes something different, and that involves survival mode, but not the way that most people think, and not the way it's mostly portrayed in the hunting media. Sure, the private land deer that our babysat specifically to be kind of dumb and vulnerable will pile into a food plodder field in a late season,

but the deer that get hunt hard usually won't. Their survival mode is to move, not a whole lot, and to do whatever moving they will do, mostly in the cover and mostly close to darkness. Walking trails out looking for heavily tracked up areas can help you pinpoint those spots. It's not easy, but it is fun, and you have another advantage when it comes to the late season, although this one can work against you, which is that the woods are real open. You know how big of a

fan I am of watching deer do stuff. Observation is the key to an awful lot of the deer I end up shooting, and there isn't much of a better time to see them than right now. With snow it gets even easier, but you have to pay attention. Winter white tails are quiet. They aren't chasing around and breaking lots of sticks and making a lot of big, noisy movements.

They move like battle weary soldiers, which in a way they kind of they appear, they go through, they disappear, They focus on danger wherever it may be, and mostly they take their time. Now, you will see some deer kind of you know, practically run into food sources, but that's a rarity and usually involves very specific circumstances. Most

of the time they just kind of show up. And if they do that one hundred and twenty five yards away in the brush, it's better to have your binos on them to see exactly what they do, then to

suddenly realize they are already halfway out across the cut cornfield. Now, I'm sure there are a few other advantages that the late season offers, including, you know, allowing you to lower your standards solow that even a button buck might get you to clip your release to your d loop, but mostly it's a matter of finding tracks, watching and then

doing a decent amount of suffering. That's what really separates the late season killers from the folks who spend most of the late season ice fishing or pulling tabs at the local watering. Hunting the late season is a matter of gauging your willingness to be uncomfortable and then pushing that as far as you can. And this starts with our brains. If you can believe that, just like when it comes to all day rut sits confidence in the

late season matters. If you're going to go out to any old favorite stand that is much better in October than at Christmas time, and you have very little faith it'll produce, but you go there because it's easy. Good luck putting in a lot of hours. Confidence in your setup can go so far in getting you out there when you need to be and keeping you there for as long as you need to be there. This is a way bigger component of late season success than most

people realize. Now, you can cheat this to some extent if you need to. The box blind hunter I shit on earlier, well, he has the right idea for comfort. If you've never sat in a Redneck or some other box blind with a heater running in the late season, you don't know how good you can have it. It's honestly kind of crazy, how comfortable you can be when you have the money and the willingness to haunt that certain way. This has become clearer to me as my

daughters have started hunting with me. And this might come as a surprise to you, but a rail thin ten year old girl doesn't have a huge tolerance for sub zero temperatures in long sits. If the wind is blowing at all, forget it unless you can put them in a blind and turn on a mister Buddy heater, which is exactly what I do. And do you know what, that heater feels pretty dang good to forty four year

old men too. Maybe you're tough as nails and can hang in a saddle all day from dark to dark, to shoot a dough in late December, but most folks can't, and most folks wouldn't even try because they know that about themselves. Maybe you need a pop up blind, you know, brushed into some cedars or something, and maybe you need a little extra heat from burning propane to get you through, if that's what it takes do that. I don't do that in the late season much for one simple reason though.

I have a hard time getting drawn in a blind during the late season. It seems like the deer are always too close, and by the time they move it's often very very calm ount When you have a bundled up hunter and a suspicious camo cube and the deer are already superjaded from a long season. I found that it's just hard for me to get drawn. I actually have way better luck and natural blinds and tree stands because the deer seem to be less focused on me then and the instead of being in a ground blind,

so that means I go through handwarmers like crazy. They are cheap, so I go pretty deep on them. And it's crazy that a mixture of iron, powder, water, salt, activated charcoal, and vermiculite can, when it's exposed to oxygen, generate an appreciable amount of heat for hours. This chemical process is pretty much the same thing that happens when iron rusts. We just forced it to happen at a much quicker pace so that it gives off heat and man,

are those things a lifesaver. I buy a lot of them, and they are an absolute blessing on late season hunts. So is something very hot to drink in a thermos. I have a good buddy of mine who is about as far behind on the times as you can get, who sent me a message during Minnesota's gun season this year. He was out with a shotgun in the southeast corner of the state trying to shoot a buck while I was across the river here in Wisconsin trying to arrow one.

It was real cold and real windy, and he mentioned that he'd appreciate some hot coffee and some food for his sit because he didn't know how long he'd make it before he would have to head back to the truck. I was like, well, buddy, have I got some good news for you, because we've been making food and beverages

portable for a long long time. I sent him a pick of my yetti full of hot coffee and my Emerging See candy bag, which is just a bag of candy I always have in my pack for those times when I need a Reese's peanut butter cup or some M and ms to get me through a long dearless part of my sit If you don't drink coffee, I don't know, because you're some kind of psycho who just raw dog's life without caffeine, then maybe your shit out

of luck. I just know that there are very few things that feel like almost instantly better than when you're freezing your little knackers off and then you take a swig of hot coffee and feeling it warming your insides up. Now you might be thinking, why don't you just layer up so you can handle it cheaf Well, that's a good point, imaginary listener person. But the truth is there's a level to which you can't get past once you've been stationary for a long time and it's very cold

out now. The right layering system and the right socks and boots and hat and whatever, it's all important. But you know that if you don't consider that extensively for your late season hunts, you're just in trouble. You'll have to move too much or just not hunt long enough, both of which will pretty much kill your chances. And if you do move too much, you might notice something else that's very difficult about late season hunting, which is

managing how much noise you make now. If you watch me hunt on any of the shows I've filmed, you'll notice one thing about me besides the fact that I make a lot of mistakes for someone who is way better at hunting than Mark, which is that I don't use hoods hardly. Ever. I hate hoods on anything but a sweatshirt. And here's why, because I can't hear anything to begin with. I've had some guns shot way too close to my ears. I played a lot of loud music,

and I've been to a ton of concerts. My hearing sucks, and hoods make my hearing sucks so much more that I cannot stand it, especially in those quiet late season conditions. But hoods also scrape the tree when I move, and I hate that too. It might not seem like that big of a deal sitting there in rifle season waiting on a buck to walk through two hundred yards away, but during late season bow hunts, that hood can be the difference between getting busted trying to get a shot

or not. I've also noticed that some of my climbing sticks just suck in really cold weather. Some suck on all trees and you know, different kinds of bark, while some only suck on certain trees with certain kinds of bark. Now, if I'm over in northern Wisconsin, for example, I know the paper bark birch trees are mostly off limits for my mobile hunts. The steps will squeak and creak, as

will my stand or my saddle platform. Some ladder stands pretty noisy too, especially ladder stands that have been up for a few years, and if they have any play in the ladder at all, they're gonna make some noise. Cold weather means quiet conditions and loud gear. Generally, that's a huge consideration. The upside to this is that you can leave most of the extra stuff at home. Late season hunting is a matter of putting yourself where the deer want to be and not doing a bunch of

call and other shit. This is something I try to think about a lot if I go mobile at all, because I want to reduce my profile as much as possible and just generally not have a bunch of stuff to bump into or have to work around. This is also why I like to do natural ground blinds when I can, Even though drawing can be a risky proposition, I don't have to make a lot of movements that could cause noise otherwise. Though now I know I haven't

painted a very rosy picture of late season hunting. Let me give you one last thing that I use to keep myself going out there even when I don't want to remember earlier in this episode, when I joked about lowering your standards to button buck level, that was only kind of sort of a joke. I know my personal odds of killing a giant buck in the late season are almost zero. I just don't have the spots and I'm certainly not going to put in the time. So

when I go I think about it differently. If I'm in Minnesota, here, it'll be just all about trying to arrow a single dough. That's the goal. Now I'm not looking for bucks. I don't have a buck tag left, at least for myself. My daughters are a different story. But for me, the scouting and the stand prep and anything else is all about just getting a dough into shooting range. That's fun because it's a doable, realistic goal,

but it's still challenging. So that works for me now over in Wisconsin, at least this year, I still have a buck tag, so my goal will be any dough or any buck. That's even more fun because it opens up the possibility to basically shoot whatever might come through the key there is to just get around deer and hope it works out. Now, if I set my sights on even a two and a half year old or older buck over there, I probably wouldn't even go hunting

because my optimism just doesn't stretch that far. I would probably have a better chance of seeing a wolf for real than a buck that has been kicking around for any length of time. So if you do decide to test your metal against late season deer and go frolic in the winter wonderland they call home, think about this stuff because it matters. What are you out there looking for? What kind of deer would make you happy? But don't

stop there. We all know what kind of deer would probably make us happy, but the reality is that you need to get one within range and it needs to be unaware of you. Now, the thought of just killing a doe or a little buck changes because academically that shouldn't be that tough for a lot of us, But when we put it into practice and head out there with our bows, it does become a hell of a

lot tougher than we think. But tough is good. Now. Sure, there are guys looking at dozens of deer eating beans planted specifically for the deer while they watch an NFL game on their phone and wait for a hitlister to wander by. But there is also the reality that most folks are out of the woods, and the last part of the season isn't for the weekend warrior. It's for someone who wants to scout, think through the whole process, and to try to make it happen even when it

flat out sucks to be in the woods. That's you, and that's what you should do this year before the whole thing ends and you regret not getting after it more. That's what I'm gonna do, and I'm going to come back next week to talk about going where you don't care about deer movement so you can learn all about deer movement. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. I gotta tell you,

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